The great Indian chor bazaar

Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of thieves: Those who steal for kicks, for the sheer thrill of it; those who steal for personal profit; and those who steal out of an undefined compulsion.I belong to the first category, having mostly stolen from bars. I still have the table standee from Twisters, a South Delhi pub, which says: “Not Shaken, Not Stirred, But Twisted.” The Happy Hour menu printed on it is pure nostalgia: Foster’s pints for Rs.50, Stroh’s for Rs.90, and “All Cocktails: Rs.125”. I once stole a peanut bowl from a friendly bar. The next time I went I fessed up, shook hands with the owner, and returned the washed bowl. He joked: Might as well have put some peanuts inside. Another time I walked out of a watering hole holding a mugful of beer while the guard was watering the plants. That taught me that a robbery in full view of the public raises the least eyebrows.I’m not always the perpetrator. As a victim, I’ve had books go missing from home. With books, one realises months after the deed, when one starts looking for it for some odd reason. Readers will recognise the feeling. The thief, in this case, steals out of inner compulsion, some form of borderline bibliophile kleptomania.Which brings us to the middle category: stealing for money. Thieves break into cars and houses all the time: I’m not speaking of that. It’s par for the course and not so interesting. What’s really fascinating is the theft of public property, in which we have a glorious ingenious and indigenous tradition.The most recent instance of this was a viral video which showed three men peering into a kirana store, wrapped in pristine white Western Railway bedsheets. I’m suspicious of viral videos because some of them seem staged. Why would three dudes wear matching bedsheet shawls and roam around in the summer. Fashion Week is months away.This video coincided with a news item in The Indian Express about railway linen being stolen to the tune of Rs.104.51 crore between January 2022 and May 2026. RTI data revealed that this includes 41.13 lakh bedsheets, 12.95 lakh blankets, 46.54 lakh face towels, and 2.76 lakh pillows. Face towels emerge the hands-down winner here (sorry, pillow); no wonder attendants nowadays don’t give them out unless the passenger specifically asks. The Railways is now considering QR coding its linen. This type of theft I’d put in a new fourth category: “stealing because you can” or because you “might as well” or, like Mallory said of Mount Everest, “because it’s there”.The Indian Railways has been a long-suffering entity. So much so that in school, teachers would scold a student who had damaged a chair or a desk by saying: “What, man, you think this is railway property or what!”There are wild stories of tracks, engines, even bridges, being stolen. A railway engineer of Samastipur Loco Diesel Shed was suspended for selling an old steam engine. The engineer—in cahoots with railway officials and security personnel—forged a letter from the Divisional Mechanical Engineer of Samastipur Rail Division ordering the engine’s sale. One can see the socialist cogs turning in the engineer’s head: Let’s make a useless piece of machinery useful; everyone in the community benefits.In full view of the publicIn 2022, thieves in Begusarai stole a diesel engine from a railway yard, piece by piece. The engine was parked for a repair job. They dug a tunnel to access the yard, then painstakingly stole every component. It reminded me of the Johnny Cash song “One Piece at a Time”, which involves the protagonist, who works on a Cadillac assembly line in Detroit, stealing parts to manufacture his own car:“The first day I got me a fuel pumpAnd the next day I got me an engine and a trunkThen I got me a transmission and all the chromeThe little things I could get in my big lunchboxLike nuts, an’ bolts, and all four shocksBut the big stuff we snuck out in my buddy’s mobile home.”In 2022 again, and in Bihar again, thieves in Rohtas district made away with an abandoned railway bridge weighing 500 tonnes and measuring 60 feet. Again, they dismantled the structure, one piece at a time, posing as officials from the State’s Irrigation Department. They performed the scrap metal heist over three days, in full view of the public. As I mentioned earlier in the walking-out-of-the-pub-with-beer-mug story, robberies work best when done under people’s noses.In yet another case, a 2 kilometre stretch of railway track was stolen by scrap dealers in Madhubani district (yes, Bihar), allegedly in connivance with Railway Protection Force personnel.Yet, the RTI data cited above also showed that it was Rajasthan’s Bikaner division that reported the highest number of missing items (25.76 lakh) while divisions like Tiruchirappalli and Palakkad reported zero theft.Applying the Johnny Cash methodPinching public property is not limited to the Railways. In a widely reported case, a pond used for cultivating water chestnuts was “stolen”: it was surreptitiously filled with soil by the land mafia who then installed a hut on it to stake their claim to it. Villagers have dug up freshly laid concrete and cement from newly built public roads to reuse the materials for personal home construction. A defunct telecom tower was systematically disassembled using the good old Johnny Cash method, this time by thieves posing as maintenance workers.

A viral video showed three men peering into a kirana store, wrapped in pristine white Western Railway bedsheets. | Photo Credit: Soniya Pondcar I mention this to demonstrate that the theft of bed linen is the least spectacular theft the Railways has suffered, in a country where theft of public property takes surreal forms. But the theft of linen does tell us something about the psychology of Indians when travelling on a train.We treat the train as an extension of home. Observing my fellow passengers on journey, I marvel at their comfort level: a man will wrap a towel around his waist and change into his nightdress of boxer shorts; in the mornings, everyone gathers around the washbasin, brushing their teeth vigorously in tandem, even if the destination station is 15 minutes away. It is my theory that in this effortless blurring of lines between home and train, we sometimes forget what we are bringing in and taking out.I remember a group of women travellers who boarded the train from the holy town of Haridwar. Since they were in the mood of religious fervour, they immediately set about singing bhajans and lighting diyas. In their heads they had just moved from one home to another; they didn’t realise that lighting any kind of fire on a train is a hazard and banned by law; the train compartment was an extension of the puja room at home. Similarly, when a passenger disembarks, I am sure he casually and unwittingly picks up the bedding too because in his head he is only switching rooms in a home.What adds to the mental illusion is the uncanny physical similarity between trains and houses. Indian architects have perfected the art of building houses whose interiors have the feel of a train. We call them “train houses”: one room consecutive to the other in a line. In many cases, the architect is dispensed with entirely, the owner being the designer-architect-contractor. Since we are moving in a continuum, from one compartment (railway) to another (room), it’s natural to bring one’s bedding along. It’s another matter that in doing so, we give rules a wide berth.There is a third reason: Indians feel the state does not really give back very much to the public in terms of infrastructure, healthcare, roads, schools, and so on, despite them paying taxes to an ever-acquisitive government. Stealing public property then becomes a form of vigilante compensation, taking back what is rightfully yours.The only reason to feel bad in all this is that with Railways linen, it’s not the government that bears the loss. It is passed on to the attendant or contractor, mostly the attendant. The cost of the missing item is docked from his pay. That is cruel. When the great Indian train robbery happens, it’s the lowest rung—the worker—that gets hurt. The trains chug along merrily.Palash Krishna Mehrotra is the author of The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passionsand Follies of India’s Technicolour Youth and the editor of House Spirit: Drinking in India.Also Read | Is Narendra Modi a dimagi poet?Also Read | Rumours of the red letter box’s death were greatly exaggerated